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My old friend Sarah Van Arsdale is giving a book-launching reading for her second novel, BLUE on Thursday, October 16 at 7 at the
Housing Works, Bookstore and Cafe at 126 Crosby Street in New York City.

This is really exciting. I was in a writers group with Sarah for years and years in Northampton, and now she's won this thing called the Peter Taylor Prize, and the book's going to be published by the University of Tennessee Press. Her first novel, Toward Amnesia, is really fabulous, too. Sarah once wrote a poem (and not a short one) looked at it in the mirror, and found that it was interesting whether you read it backwards or forewards, so the poem became both versions together. The thing I love about this is that she bothered to look at it in the mirror, and to recognize what she saw. There's nothing like a radical shift of perspective to free things up.

This post represents the first time I've entered a link to something, like the Housing Works Bookstore/Cafe -- which, by the way, evidently donates its profits towards housing for homeless people living with HIV and AIDS -- hidden under its name, and it seems to be working. Yayy, new skills. I'm going to New York City for Sarah's reading, which is also the day before my birthday, and one of my tasks today is to come up with a relatively inexpensive place to stay in the city...

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Ooo, and, another first, a review that I wrote of Nymph by Francesca Lia Block has just been posted at Strange Horizons, a weekly magazine of speculative fiction on the web.

To find it, just look down the page for this and click on the link:

REVIEWS: Sexual Transformations: Nymph by Francesca Lia Block, by Susan Stinson
The stories in Nymph don't take a reader to another, distant world, but deeper into the unspoken places of this one. Each story is small and radiant, with delicate, precise language and spare settings that open into hidden recesses of consciousness and sexuality.

These stories mostly represent sexuality very different than my own, but I loved them for their magic realism and for how beautifully they are written. Evidently Francesca Lia Block is very well-known for her Weetzie Bat books, but I had never heard of her before I read Nymph because her publisher, Circlet Press, sent me a review copy.

And it's great to be published in a magazine of speculative fiction, since I've been drawn to those genres lately.